Could An Intensive Group Discussion Transform How Your Company Tells Its Story To The Outside World?

My last newsletter article "What’s Your Story? Is Your Approach To Storytelling Standing In The Way Of Your Organisations Success?" explored the critical role of effective storytelling in driving organisational performance and business growth. It also delved into common pitfalls that hinder many companies from effectively communicating their narratives. Finally, I offered insights into key steps organisations can take to enhance their storytelling and, consequently, achieve improved outcomes.

Having successfully implemented these steps with numerous organisations through both on-site and virtual workshops, I am eager to share a more in-depth account of my approach. This will include valuable insights and feedback gathered throughout the process, providing a comprehensive understanding of the steps involved and the tangible benefits realised by these organisations.

What's Involved?

Workshops can range from one to five days in duration, depending on the scope of the project. This could encompass a company-wide initiative spanning the breadth of its offerings or focus on a specific product, service or capability.

Regardless of the scope, I employ a proven and tested methodology designed to address the critical questions: "What are you missing?" and "How can you do a better job?"

To facilitate each engagement, I convene a cross-functional team of subject matter experts from within the client organization. This typically includes representatives from development, product management, customer success, and go-to-market teams, who actively collaborate on the project. In smaller organisations the individual's involved may wear multiples hats.

Unlocking Customer Value Through The "Art Of Asking"

Unlocking true customer value begins with a powerful series of insightful questions. By shifting the focus from highlighting product features and benefits to deeply understanding customer needs, challenges, and aspirations, businesses can cultivate stronger relationships, develop more innovative and customer-centric solutions, and ultimately deliver an exceptional customer experience that exceeds expectations.

The 'art of asking' involves going beyond surface-level inquiries to delve into the 'why' behind customer decisions, uncover hidden needs, and understand the true impact of their challenges. This customer-centric approach not only enhances the customer experience but also drives product innovation, business growth and long-term success.

We initiate the process by posing the following key questions:

• Who within the organization is directly or indirectly impacted by the capabilities offered by your solutions?
• What are the most significant challenges and opportunities facing these individuals that consume their time and/or resources?
• How can we succinctly describe, for each challenge, the value proposition of our solution? We refer to these concise descriptions as "Value Drivers."

Having established a set of "Value Drivers," we delve deeper by asking the following critical questions for each one:

• What is the current operating mode that contributes to the customer's challenge?
• What are the impacts and consequences of this current operating mode?
• What does success look like after adopting our products/services? What are the desired positive outcomes?
• What are the core capabilities essential for achieving these positive outcomes?
• How effectively does our product/service address these critical requirements?
• What differentiates our offering from competitive alternatives, including the option of maintaining the status quo (doing nothing)?
• How can we effectively measure the successful delivery of these positive outcomes? (e.g., metrics, KPIs)
• What evidence and proof points can we leverage to validate the company's credibility and the value proposition?

By diligently addressing these questions, we develop a distinctive and differentiated messaging framework. This framework serves as the cornerstone for creating compelling and impactful content across a diverse range of channels, including websites, presentations, blog posts, white papers/e-books, collateral materials, and more.

Furthermore, this framework supports the internal learning and development of customer-facing teams.

Significantly, this process also drives product innovation by identifying critical gaps in the organisation's current capabilities that are essential for effectively addressing customer value drivers.

Participants Take Aways?

After completing these engagements I take it upon myself to speak with members of the executive teams and workshop participants to get their perspective on the value they got from the process. Here is some of the feedback; ?

“Before we went through this process our messaging and engagement was product centric?focusing on the features and benefits of our solution. Our engagements are now more customer centric, looking at the world through their lens. As a consequence we have increased our volume of customer engagements and have less drop out from our customer interactions.”?

“Bringing together people from diverse roles, with different perspectives, in the workshops, enabled us to capture a much broader picture of the challenges facing our customers, that we can effect. We now have a consistent narrative that is aligned with this. This has enabled us to be more targeted in the companies and personas of people we target. It has increased the perceived value that our solution can bring, and accelerated the velocity of deals because we are attaching ourselves to the issues that are top of mind for customers right now. It has also helped us to defend the value of solution when it's time to negotiate.”?

“As the leader of the company I had attempted to run this type of engagement in the past with varying degrees of success. Having someone, with a wealth of prior experience and structured approach, from the outside really helped facilitating and mediating the process. Individuals were much more forthcoming with their ideas and their thinking could be challenged without any negative consequences.” ?

“This was a simple agile process that we could completed in a short amount of time, at a reasonable cost, and the value this delivered far outweighed the overall investment.”??

“Senior people, with influence in our organisation had a narrow opinion of what our solution could do and it was hard to get our opinions across. This process enabled our voices to be heard. Our executives are now more enlightened and as a consequence I believe we have a much more compelling story to tell to the market.”??

“Going through this process helped to shape our thinking around our product direction as we identified some important customer challenges that we had not previously considered.”

Execution

Whether you're a seasoned business or a budding startup, taking a step back to critically examine your messaging and storytelling approach can unlock significant value. Based on my first hand experience – both as an insider within companies and as an external facilitator – this process can pave the way for greater success.

You can take the initiative to lead this yourself following the advice I give in this and my previous article, or seek help externally from someone with prior experience.

You can also find more articles on the Breakthrough Moments website offering help and advice on how to drive business growth.